Wednesday, December 21st, 2016

Time	Event
1:32a	Watts to Bits: Your Daily Data Center News Briefing SDN Startup PlumGrid Shutting Down, VMware Buys Assets The once-promising SDN startup Plumgrid is shutting down five years after its founding, with its much larger competitor VMware acquiring the company’s technology and intellectual property. The company was founded by former Cisco engineers when the SDN market was just starting to gain steam. Details here. UK Government Asks Celebrity Investors to Return Data Center Tax-Break Money The UK’s customs and tax department is asking a group of investors in a slow-going two-data center construction project in North East England to return millions of pounds they collectively received in the form of tax breaks for the project. Many of the investors – a group which includes numerous celebrities – got more money in tax relief than they paid in because the government scrapped the tax allowances right after they were given out. Details here. Cisco is Killing Its Cloud of Clouds Add Cisco to the list of IT giants that have tried and failed to become providers of cloud infrastructure services. The company has decided to shut down its public cloud called Intercloud Services and move customer environments to unspecified “other platforms.” Details here. All-Flash Storage Firm Violin Files for Bankruptcy Around since 2005, Violin Memory was one of the first vendors to push all-flash storage arrays in the enterprise data center market. But the company failed to turn its early start into a market lead. Last week, it filed for bankruptcy protection and announced it would hold an auction for its assets. Details here. SuperNAP Italia Switched On SuperNAP International, a partnership between Switch, the company behind a series of gigantic and flashy SuperNAP data centers in Las Vegas, and an investment fund, announced the launch of a data center in Siziano, Italy, just outside Milan. This is Switch’s first venture outside US. The company is also building a data center in Thailand. Details on the Siziano facility here.   (Comment on this)
2:46p	What Will Equinix’s $40M Verizon Data Center Integration Entail? It certainly isn’t being treated as a fixer-upper. When announcing his company’s $3.6 billion acquisition of nearly 30 Verizon data centers earlier this month, Equinix CEO Steve Smith told analysts on a conference call that the purchase price was about 13 times the annual earnings he expected the portfolio to generate once the deal was closed. Then he added: “This adjusted EBITDA excludes approximately $40 million in integration costs anticipated over that timeframe.” Integrating another company’s facilities into one’s portfolio — especially at this scale — may not be as simple as changing the sign on the door and peeling the red pinstripes off the cabinets. What would that $40 million be used for, and will it be enough? “If you look at any of the acquisitions, there’s a fairly detailed and involved integration [plan] that we start creating between the signing process, then through close, and executing immediately after close,” Jon Lin, Equinix VP for corporate development and strategy, told Data Center Knowledge in an interview. That integration process includes branding of the sites, product “harmonization” between the acquired sites and the rest of the portfolio, assessing the infrastructure, and identifying any necessary investment to bring it up to Equinix standards. “That would all be considered as part of the timeline.” The full integration period could consume 16 to 18 months, he estimated, during which the acquired sites’ 250 or so employees — who will be joining Equinix — would need to maintain Verizon’s by then former customers. For details on the deal itself: Why Equinix is Buying Verizon Data Centers for $3.6B On the conference call, an analyst wondered how Equinix would be able to pull off an integration of such scope, which includes an expansion of its presence in Brazil and entry into a whole new country, Colombia, especially given that it’s still integrating European assets of recently acquired Telecity and Japanese assets of recently acquired of Bit-isle? Smith said the Verizon deal will be headed up by the company’s president for the Americas, Karl Strohmeyer, who is not connected with the other two operating regions and who is free to give his full attention to the integration in North and South America. “We will move ahead very quickly on this,” Smith said. “Karl has a well-detailed plan for this thing and will move very quickly in parallel with the other two acquisitions. This is very digestible for us.” Equinix announced the Telecity deal in May 2015 and Bit-isle the following September. Both were whole-company acquisitions, while the Verizon deal is more of a “carve-out,” as Equinix executives put it, which, according to Strohmeyer, is an important distinction. “Typically, we buy a complete company with all the systems, services, support, infrastructure,” he said on the call. In the Verizon deal, “we are purchasing the assets themselves — and obviously the customers in the assets, and the revenue streams associated with those customers, as well as the data center operators themselves. It’s effectively an asset plug-in to the current operating model within the Americas today.” In response to another analyst’s question as to how the company would “Equin-ize” the assets, Strohmeyer reiterated that his team had performed the necessary due diligence to ensure that the former Terremark assets were as high-quality as Verizon had been touting them to be and found “nothing of concern.” It’s worth noting that the other two big integrations are still ongoing. Has it simply become a fact of doing business in this industry that a data center provider of Equinix’s scale must make a large acquisition every year or so just to remain competitive and thus remain in perpetual state of asset integration? “I wouldn’t say so,” said Lin. “I think we’re pretty measured about looking at opportunities in the market for inorganic growth. But certainly on an organic basis, we’re very comfortable and confident with the plan we have in place. We’re obviously evaluating opportunities as they come up, and if we think there’s the opportunity to create value — which we certainly see in this case, as we have with the rest of our transactions — then we evaluate it and look to do a transaction.” (Comment on this)
3:05p	How to Make Big Data Agile Without Compromising Privacy? Nitin Donde is the Founder and CEO of Talena, Inc. In just three years, it is expected that more than 35 zettabytes of data will be generated worldwide, a 44 percent rise since 2009. Perhaps more surprising is that 80 percent of this data will be managed and protected by enterprises — creating a natural dichotomy between the need for business agility and the need to ensure adequate consumer privacy. As today’s digital world becomes an all-knowing one, how do we keep consumer data safe — especially when any breakdown in privacy would be catastrophic for the keeper of it? Why is this debate of even greater importance now? Because companies increasingly understand that data assets can and will drive significant market share or revenue gains. Witness the recent IBM acquisition of Weather Channel and the Morningstar acquisition of Pitchbook. Furthermore, these growing data assets rarely stay static in a single infrastructure environment. They are always on the move — from a storage environment to an analytics cluster, or from an on-premise data center to the public cloud — often in the name of greater business agility. The combination of volume and velocity of these bigger data assets make many privacy advocates nervous about the potential for not just data breaches (hello, Yahoo!) but also for data exposure to employees not authorized to view these assets. Yet, there are steps that enterprises can take to overcome the agility-privacy divide and still emerge successfully in a world increasingly based on rapid processing of large data sets. The common dictum that “no enterprise is an island” applies equally to their big data infrastructure. Companies will use different big data systems for different business purposes — they will collect and store data in Hadoop while running highly scalable analytics on HPE Vertica, for example. Since these data assets are often on the move, there is a need for transparency around the customer privacy contract. The bulk of privacy concerns are often related to the notion that data is “secure” and won’t be knowingly or unwittingly shared with any third party. But this does not always address the concept of unintended internal access to these data sets. Complicating matters in the United States is the fact that there is a broad array of laws and regulations applied to data privacy, unlike some countries that have a “one privacy size fits all data” approach. Depending on the data sets involved, a company could have many or few privacy regulations applied to their data sets. There are three primary threats that can affect the continued safety and privacy of company data sets: a breach from the outside, insider theft, and unintentional internal exposure. According to a PwC study, those companies that can successfully blend risk-agility (the idea of rapidly changing risk management infrastructure to adapt to changing market conditions) with risk-resiliency (the idea of withstanding business disruption with solid processes, tools and controls) are typically the “highest performers”, showing high growth with appropriate privacy and risk controls. In the PwC study, this was just 36 percent of the survey respondents, indicating a significant opportunity for companies worldwide to reach the ideal privacy-growth mix. There are a few critical processes that companies can employ to take full advantage of delivering more relevant applications faster while still adapting to the necessary privacy processes to work in this world of big data sets: Ensure that your IT team understands the business context for these data assets so they can deploy the necessary products and implement the relevant processes to support the privacy/security mandates for the company, yet still support the business. There is no one-size-fits-all model and each enterprise should have its own strategy. Consider leveraging production data as part of your QA process to reduce application errors and hasten time to market. Application teams have always known that testing with production data (as opposed to leveraging synthetic data) leads to higher-quality applications and greater customer satisfaction. Given the above, you need to understand how encryption and data masking fit into the overall application iteration process so that data is not unwittingly seen by your engineering, QA, and other team members associated with your test data process Finally, ensure that you have appropriate user policies associated with not just the data stores themselves but the data management processes as well. Conclusion In a Cap Gemini survey, about 60 percent of companies surveyed indicated that the data they hold is a core component of their market value — the recent spate of acquisitions is just another indicator of this data-centric trend. It’s incumbent on all companies to think in parallel with their data acquisitions and know exactly how they can remain agile yet provide the necessary safeguards so customers feel comfortable interacting and engaging with this new breed of companies. Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Penton. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
5:26p	Senior Oracle Staffer Resigns After Co-CEO Catz Joins Trump Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud A senior staffer at Oracle who joined the company in 1993 has tendered his resignation after the news last week that Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz would be a part of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team. In a resignation letter posted on LinkedIn, George A. Polisner said that he does not support Trump and “therefore must resign from this once great company.” For the past four years, Polisner has worked in Oracle’s managed cloud services division. “I began with Oracle in 1993 and was proud to work among some of the best software development and operations engineers in the world. I’ve made significant contributions to Oracle along the way in my various roles ranging from consulting, product development, customer advocacy, program management and now in Cloud,” he said. ​“I am not with President-elect Trump and I am not here to help him in any way. In fact –when his policies border on the unconstitutional, the criminal and the morally unjust –I am here to oppose him in every possible and legal way.” Catz was part of the meeting that Trump held last week in New York with other high-profile technology executives which included Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins, Apple’s Tim Cook, Palantir Technologies Inc. CEO Alex Karp and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. Polisner has created a petition for Oracle employees “to stand together against the racial, religious and other intolerance that Donald Trump’s policies and rhetoric promotes.” Within an hour of being live, the petition has 10 signatures. In the description of the petition, Polisner said that these polices put “…[Oracle’s] Latino, Muslim-American, those with disabilities, and other community members directly at risk. There is no place for this kind of discrimination at Oracle Corporation or in America.” “As a community, we affirm the values that make us who we are: diversity, openness and compassion,” he writes. “Join me in saying: Donald Trump is not who America is, and he is not who Oracle Corporation is.” This article first ran here, on Talkin’ Cloud. (Comment on this)
9:51p	Watts to Bits: Your Daily Data Center News Briefing Here is a collection of links to recent news you need to know about as a data center professional. Curated by DCK staff: Court Says EU Governments Can’t Force Internet Firms to Store User Data Europe’s highest court has ruled that laws requiring internet companies to indiscriminately store every user’s entire web surfing and messaging record – such as the laws that recently passed in Sweden and Britain – are illegal. The ruling is viewed as a major setback for European law enforcement authorities’ efforts to expand their surveillance powers as they combat terrorism and other crime. Details here IBM’s Weather Company is Really Good at Forecasting ForecastWatch, a company that keeps an eye on how accurate various weather-forecast services are, has found The Weather Channel and Weather Underground (both IBM’s Weather Company brands) to be more accurate than other services it tracks. The forecasting system runs on IBM’s cloud platform and uses data analytics and machine learning algorithms to synthesize a single forecast from data included in 162 individual forecasts it ingests. Details here Facebook Hires Away Big Switch CTO Rob Sherwood Rob Sherwood, CTO of Big Switch, one of the top data center SDN startups, has left the company to join Facebook. In a blog post, Sherwood said the startup was enjoying a lot of success but he wanted to go back to working in a lab on seemingly insolvable technology problems. Details here SoftBank Invests $1B in Satellite Internet Startup OneWeb SoftBank, the Japanese telecommunications and internet conglomerate that among other brands owns ARM Holdings and Sprint Corp., has invested $1 billion in OneWeb, a startup that’s planning to launch hundreds of satellites that will connect vehicles in urban areas and homes in rural areas to the internet. The funding round makes SoftBank OneWeb’s largest shareholder, with 40 percent of the company. Details here Minnesota Luring US Bank Data Center Build With Incentive Package US Bank is eyeing a potential $250 million data center project in Chaska, Minnesota, built by Stream Data Centers. State and local governments are putting together a package of tax breaks and grants to sweeten the pot for the bank. Details here (Comment on this)

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